An arrest – and remand time – for being suspected of possessing extreme porn may act as wake-up call for those who thought that the new law on extreme porn would just quietly fade away.
Nathan Porter, of Jones Street, Pendleton, has been charged with seven counts of possession of extreme pornographic images and appeared for a …

I hope some strange stuff it still legal

@Trafficking, fiction

"Some years ago, my wife worked in the Police in an eastern European country, in the department dealing with the fight against human trafficking....From the victims who managed to escape they got glimpses of a huge underground world. Yes, it's hard to set numbers - it's not like they are running censuses, aren't they? But each escaping victim would tell how many others have left behind, or through how many locations they were moved. My wife told me some of the stories they encountered and they were really horrific."

I call bollocks. The performers of sex acts are recorded now to prove they are over the age of consent, the producer of the porn can be visited, they are normal business, they sell their DVD through normal channels. It is a legal business in many countries. Their identities are traceable and the evidence is there on DVD.

The going rate for a doggy porn session is $2k, they don't spend $10k smuggling women to a different country to film something in a different country.

"Some of them develop very strong cases of the Stockholm syndrome. And even when they escape, they are stigmated for life and it's hard to reintegrate into the society."

Do you even listen to your own story, "Stockholm syndrome"? You sound like that anti porn campaigner Jacqui hired who claimed snuff movies were popular in the sex shops in Amsterdam, which pissed off the dutch no end being total bollocks.

In your fiction there are women smuggled from eastern europe to other place, to film sex acts with dogs, because it's somehow easier to smuggle the person than the *camera* into their country, that this great expense is paid in order to film this act.

When in reality, they do it for money, it's a lot cheaper to pay a girl to do a dog than to kidnap/traffic them to somewhere else to film the act.

It's fiction, and it shows two things to me, firstly you are from the UK, because your perception of foreign places is of a 'wild frontier' and not real life. Secondly that you imagine a woman wouldn't do such a 'disgusting' thing for money unless coerced, which indicates to me that you've never been poor or hungry.

All Glory to the Hypno-Law!

@ bleh

Interesting story, and I don't disbelieve it, but I question your conclusions. First of all, do you know all the details about your co-worker's arrest? Did he really create child porn or only "make" it by downloading it? And what kind was it? Given that child porn could mean a picture of a 17-year-old in a consensual act, that label alone doesn't tell use much.

I do think it's possible to have an unhealthy interest in porn, and having a huge amount on a work computer isn't a good sign. I don't like to use the word addiction, since that implies a physical dependancy, but it can become an obsession, like many thing. But how do you get from there to "extreme porn should be illegal"?

Or are you arguing for outlawing all porn, even though you think an interest in it can be healthy? That would at least make some kind of sense. Otherwise I don't see how you intend to stop this supposed escalation effect.

This guy you knew already jumped from legal to illegal porn, right? So making more of it illegal wouldn't help. Unless you made it all illegal, so he wouldn't have been exposed to its corrupting effects. Wait. But what about soft-core erotic images? We'd have ban those too, or they might tempt someone to look at some for that forbidden "hardcore" stuff they've heard about.

The base of the laws should be shifted to better align with the spirit of the legal system.

Simply put, possession of material the existence of which necessitates the previous commission of a criminal act or acts should not be, in and of itself, a crime. The exception being in the case that it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual in possession of such material conspired directly, regarding the commission of the aforementioned act(s), with the party or parties who actually committed the same.

More importantly, how did they cacth him in the first place...

Since it's not clearly defined anywhere what "extreme porn" actually is, you have to wonder how are the authorities monitoring for this "crime". What's "extreme" to one person is merely "meh" to another.

Quite frankly, I don't get how a woman masturbating a horse is animal cruelty. Giving a horse an orgasm is a crime???

So to sum up

There is nothing wrong with possessing dirty porn because the campaigners needs to add 'trafficking' or 'nukes' or 'kiddies' or whatever to justify their argument.

If they can't rationalize their prosecution of ordinary people without building an elaborate fantasy around it, then we're locking people up for other people's elaborate fantasies.

If Sarah permits we can link to NSFW websites and we'll go through who the actresses are, the agency they book through, their rate cards, etc. trouble is the web cache of such sites would be a criminal offense in the UK, and quite frankly I'm not sure we can even discuss it without some pompous arch-bishop chief constable abusing his police powers.

But reality can't enter this conversation can it? We had that 'study' from Jacqui Smith, that came *after* she announce she was going to ban 'extreme' porn to justify her previous decision: Rapists admit to frequently having iPods ergo iPods causes rape.... erm sorry, I mean rapists frequently admit to viewing *porn*, hence *porn* causes rape.

She was rubbish, and the new Home Secretary won't fix any of her mistakes.

Perforated pics

I have in my possession photographic images of Thatcher, Blair, Brown and Mandelson. Does my ownership of these images imply that I am in some way complicit in their criminal mismanagement of the Uk economy over the last thirty years?

As to why any normal person would allow such depraved and obscene material into their home I can only say that I do so on the recommendation of my therapist who assures me that my depression will be alleviated if I spend at least ten minutes each day throwing darts at this gallery of political Neanderthals.

I do worry that all these perforations may be misconstrued by the thought police as sexual holes.

Ladies, cover your ankles

Possession laws

I have misgivings about all possession laws, whether for photos, data, or chemicals. That is not to say that possession of some of these items should never ever be an offence, but they do have a risk in that no proof seems to be required as to how the offending item came into your possession. So this makes it really easy for some malicious person to stitch you up. All they have to do is get access to either your premises, your computer, or even your jacket, and they can put something into your possession that can have you in real trouble. Just how do you prove that the litle bag of white powder hidden in your lounge was put there by some unknown third party, or for that matter by the police officer doing the search?

I can see the point in discouraging people from possessing and circulating pictures of child abuse, if only on the grounds of reducing the market for the stuff and hence the temptation for people to create more. OTOH I would also be inclined to classify napalming children as a form of abuse, which would make a very famous prize winning photograph from the Vietnam war illegal. So it is not that easy.

On the trafficking side of things, you don't have to watch very much of the legal stuff (legal where I am anyway, pretty much similar to what would be legal in the USA, with participants over 18 and names etc on record) to see that some of the participants, both women and men, are enjoying what they are doing, and some are not. OK, that is pretty subjective, and I suppose it is possible that some are really hating it and are just very good actors. I personally can quite enjoy seeing an attractive couple having a lot of fun together as a preliminary to doing likewise with my wife, and we very much prefer movies where the participants are in fact having fun. I concede that this would be harder to tell with animals, but then that stuff doesn't interest me anyway, and I find it hard to beleive that the animal has given informed consent. Shouldn't the animal be over 18 too?

Lets stop....

@@Trafficking, fiction

It's of course your right to believe or not my story. All that I said is true. I am from Eastern Europe and I was poor. And having grown up under a communist regime, I understand better than you do the dangers of an over-powering government with a strong addiction to surveillance.

I didn't say that women are trafficked for being shown in porn movies - although that happends sometimes too. They are trafficked for much worse things. Just because you don't know any illegal brothels, it doesn't mean they don't exist.

Currently I live in Netherlands, where prostitution has a very clear legal framework. An indeed I think this is a better system and it does cut down a lot on trafficking - but still, it doesn't stop it completely. There were victims retrieved from Netherlands too. A "slave owner" makes more money and doesn't have to bother about any legal restrictions - or even taxes for that matter.

I don't have anything against legal prostitution, as I don't have anything against porn, no matter how extreme. As long as everything is done consensual, government has no business telling people what to do, watch or think.

Basically there are two main points I wanted to make:

1. Hunting porn watchers under the pretext of fighting traffic is stupid and in fact counter-productive, as we've seen here quite clearly. It actually makes people to dismiss the problem of trafficking altogether.

2. Trafficking is a serious problem and it doesn't disappear simply by pretending that it doesn't exist.

@Jesse Dorland

Interesting choice of words you use viz "pervert" and "get a girlfried"...

Oddly enough in the last century, those who wanted to get themselves a *boyfriend* instead were branded as "perverts" and, indeed, at times could be locked up for their actitivies.

It wasn't that they were doing any harm to anyone, it wasn't that their activities were non-consensual, it wasn't that they were a threat to children (despite the media pushing scare stories about all of these) it was simply that there were a bunch of narrow-minded bigots who thought "we don't like this, so *they* should not be allowed to do this and we'll use any justification we can find (whether it's factually based or not) in order to get laws through to stop them from engaging in their 'perversions'".

Those are exactly the same sort of arguments that were pushed to con people into passing the Dangerous Pictures Act. So, is that the sort of mindset you support? It certainly seems that way.

Re: Informed Consent

"...I would imagine that the case against bestiality porn is that animals, like children, are considered unable to give consent, thus the DVDs feature depictions of real unconsensual sex...."

Wait. Hold up.

Are you suggesting that the same right to withdraw or withhold consent that human (children or otherwise) hold should be extended to animals? Isn't that the ridiculous line touted by PETA; "Animals are people too"?

Well, they're not. We slaughter animals for our own use on a collosal scale on a daily basis, we use them in entertainment, we keep them (sometimes) in dreadfully poor conditions. We don't seek consent for any of THOSE activities, why should we seek it for anything else that we want to do with them?

Why the moral line drawn abitrarily here, and not on the subject of KILLING the animal? If I made a video wherein I shot a rabid dog, would I be subject to prosecution? What if it were a healthy dog? What about a kitten?

Or, how about it was a white shark that was known to have eaten someone?

Where on earth are people drawing this line? The Ebola virus has the right to live, unmolested?

(granted, making a video of someone sexually abusing a virus, or shooting it would be particularly difficult, but would it be amoral?)

Coming Soon...

Highly recommend that anyone wishing to think about this whole subject area look out for 'Coming Soon', a recent independent film that tackles the whole thorny area of zoophilia, and places it in its social context. You can even see it free at http://www.comingsoon.cz.

Re: well if he got the porn from p2p

No sir! I also wouldn't want anyone who watches horror or thriller movies near me. They will obviously recreate what they have seen on their neighbours.

These video game players are also a real liability. They like to shoot people and commit violent acts in a virtual world, what is to stop them from doing it in the real world?

Also some novels depict rape and violence, I'm sure the people who read such filth will go out and recreate what they have read.

If only we could ban everything, control everything people read, watch and listen to, and limit what they talk about. There needs to be some kind of.. thought police. Free speech is dangerous. If people were not aware of these things, they would not happen.